Staying active is more important than a number on the scale when it comes to preventing premature death, a recent study shows.

The study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine was published in November and reported in HealthDay on Jan. 9.

The study found that being aerobically fit — how well your heart, lungs and muscles work together to give your body oxygen during exercise — can lower the risk of premature death, even in people who are obese.

Being fit slashed the risk of premature death by half for people with obesity, compared to those of normal weight who were not aerobically fit.

“This tells us that it’s much more important, all things considered, to focus on the fitness aspect” of health and longevity, “rather than the fatness aspect,” Siddhartha Angadi, senior author of the study and an exercise physiologist at the University of Virginia, told The Washington Post.

The report included data from 20 prior studies involving nearly 400,000 midlife and older adults. The participants were from multiple countries; about 30% of the people were women.

Participants were placed into groups based on their aerobic fitness, which was measured through cardiovascular stress tests and body mass index (BMI).

Those who were fit and overweight or obese had similar risks of death as fit people at a normal weight. People who were not fit, regardless of their weight, had two to three times higher risks of dying early from any cause or heart disease, specifically.

“From a statistical standpoint, fitness largely eliminated the risk” of early death from obesity-related conditions, Angadi said.

Improving fitness doesn’t have to require extreme effort. Merely exercising and moving has health benefits, Angadi said. Improving fitness can include brisk walks, moving at a pace that allows you to talk but not sing, he added.

Barry Braun, executive director of the Human Performance Clinical Research Laboratory at Colorado State University, was not part of the study but said the results were “important” because they show that there’s a protective aspect to fitness despite a person’s gender or size.